Learning from Andromeda, Lessons for the Future.

My God... the shear amount of hypocrisy & irony contained within these 2 posts would surely be enough to completely obliterate 10 military men, yet somehow, suikoden remains intact and blissfully oblivious to the small tear in the space time continuum that he managed to unintentionally rip open...

May God help us all if suikoden ever repeats this costly mistake and further pries opens that fissure in the fabric of time... we may not survive such a cataclysmic event.

Maybe that depends on your choices? The result of that mission can either cement the trust or create more distrust to the point where Jaal won't speak to Ryder for a period of time.


I'm not sure what the grand nephew had to do with Drack feeling useless. Drack's arrival at a point where he feels like he still has more to offer is internal growth. I also got a kick out of the organic grenades.


Vetra learns to give Sid some space to grow up and start treating her like more of an equal. Their relationship changes due to this quest.

As for the quest itself, I enjoyed the videos of each room that allowed me to choose different tactical approaches.


For Peebee, it forced her to deal with and resolve her relationship with her ex.


It's a watershed opportunity for Cora to learn that her mentor doesn't have all the right answers and might not always make the decision that Cora finds most moral.

I'm starting to feel like I played a different game.

Love you too bby.

Didn't they give the game to test audiences for feedback and it got an 8 average? It was in one of the articles, I think. I assume they gave it to BW fans and other players already inclined to play it.

If I recall correctly, you were the one who jumped on me when I dared to post anything remotely positive about ME:A. Maybe you should practice what you preach.

I agree in parts. Andromeda had a lot of story pieces moving at once to have quests branch off of. 1) Finding viable planets and settling them 2) fighting the Kett/Archon 3) Connecting and building your team/ personal revelations regarding Ryder 4) establishing relationships with the Angara 5) unraveling the mystery of the Remnant 6) Dealing with the chaos on the Nexus and getting it back in to working order and finding the arks/pathfinders

For the most part, I thought Bioware did a good job of making side quests tie in to one of these many main plot points of the game one way or another. Whether you were conducting missions to establish relationships with the people on the planets you wanted to settle, going on missions with your team (which in turn, all except for Vetra's, tied in to one of the main plot points as well) or fighting the Kett, they all seemed to tie in somewhere. The thing about Andromeda is that unlike the original trilogy that had a narrow main story, Andromeda had many. ME1 your main objective was to find and stop Saren and the Geth. ME2 your main objective was to recruit a team and travel through the Omega relay to stop the Collectors. ME3 was to unite the galaxy and defeat the Reapers. Andromeda had no one single focus. It was open and basically just... find us a home. A broad story that opens many moving parts of exactly what that means. While the trilogy had a lot of quests that had absolutely nothing to do with anything going on anywhere at all; think Hackett calling you in ME1 for random reasons that had nothing to do with hunting Saren or the random missions that would pop up when mining worlds in ME2; Andromeda's side quests were all going after an objective of the broad story. While the writing on some of the quests wasn't top tier, I do applaud them for mostly having a purpose that pushed towards one of the many plot points above.

Now a broad story like I said can be a good thing or a bad thing. Good in the sense that you CAN have all these moving parts and have tons of side quests that tie in to something. Bad in the sense that the game can feel meandering with no focus and no real point to doing the things you are doing. I can see the good and bad in open stories like Andromeda and focused stories like ME1. This problem though, doesn't just happen in Mass Effect though. It happens in all RPGs it seems. For instance, in Fallout 4, your main objective is to find your missing son. However, there are side quests and other things to do that distract you from that objective. It can take you out of the experience when you don't really care about such a focused objective that SHOULD be very important to your character to complete. Then you have games like Skyrim where, like Andromeda, there are a tremendous amount of story lines that can be considered "Main story" points. For instance, the real main story of Skyrim is the quest line to stop the dragons returning to Skyrim. However, there is also the Civil War story established in the first moments of the game's opening, the Dark Brotherhood, the Companions, the Thieves Guild, the mages at Winterhold etc. The problem here is you can get in to such an overlap of who your character is in your quest to "complete" the game. For instance you can be the hero of the Imperial Legion and champion to the Empire in Cyrodiil who stopped the war-mongering rebellion from Ulfric Stormcloak... and then that same character can also be the leader of the Skyrim chapter of the Dark Brotherhood who just went on an assassination mission to murder that very same Emperor of the Empire you are a hero of.

I think what Bioware needs to improve on next is showing us more consequences for the decisions we make in both main story and side quests.  I don't think we NEED to wait until the next installment to see the payoff for a choice we made in a side quest.  Have an easter egg later on that shows us something.  The Witcher 3 does this in spades.  You are almost always finding things later on that are the direct result of something you did or said in an earlier quest.

Before I end up meandering with my own thoughts on this, I will say, I do think they can keep it tighter with the fetch quests. NO ONE likes fetch quests. They never have and they never will. I don't care about going around the map and scanning random artifacts for someone's science interests. Take these out of gaming forever and no one will miss them.



Honestly, I don't have many suggestions with how to improve the dialogue system. Voiced protagonists cause problems for RPGs and limit the dialogue options available.  I like having a voiced protag, but consider a game like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim with their vast amounts of things to say at any given instance and dialogue branches to ask questions about different subjects to games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age Inquisition and Fallout 4. A voiced protagonist is more expensive and difficult to record ample dialogue than an unvoiced text protagonist. I highly doubt Bioware is going to return to unvoiced protagonists, though that would be the best solution to create vast dialogue choices. However, I think they struck a decent balance with Andromeda... although I never play evil characters in RPGs so I can't speak to the people who feel jilted by the lack of renegade options.



Well I wouldn't say that it was their best story ever. I'm a big fan of Andromeda, and all my previous posts reflect that, however, I don't think it's their best story. For instance, I think the overall story of Mass Effect 1 was better. From the world design and building to the actual plot of the game, the revelations you uncover and the main villain were better written in my mind. Andromeda does things better in some ways. For instance, the companions, to me, are FAR better written than they were in ME1. I've said in other posts characters like Liara, Tali and Garrus didn't blossom into characters you could love until ME2 for the most part, while Andromeda made me feel different emotions for those characters in the same game.  

I do agree. Andromeda played it pretty safe for the most part. Good stories need to make us feel like there are real stakes if we fail. It didn't REALLY ever feel like the Kett and Archon were a major threat to us or that our heroes were in a position to fail or pushed to their limits. I want to see evolution and change. I want to see them pushed to their breaking point. It makes the victory in the end all that much more satisfying. For instance, ME1 did it right with Kaiden and Ashley. That was a major, gut-wrenching choice that had real stakes to it. Then when Saren and the Geth invaded the Citadel with the revelation of Sovereign fresh in our mind and on his way... we really felt urgency. I liked Andromeda's story and I think that it did a pretty good job establishing the brand new world and moving a lot of plot points forward, I hope a potential sequel expands on it in a good way. For instance, leaving Heleus would be a good step. We know the rest of the galaxy consists of a grand Kett Empire. I want to be overwhelmed by the odds.

The very act of choosing to join the Ai would ostensibly require a commitment to break with the past and get over cultural rivalries. They didn't have the luxury of independent home worlds or governments. The Milkies needed to join in a united front to deal with whatever else they would encounter in Andromeda.


The Nexus Uprising happened off-screen. We did experience an official first contact between the Ai and angaran government.



It would have been a helluva lot easier for them to stay with the same old MW feuds - keep doing what they've always done. Instead, they took some risks and did some things differently.

I mock the game. Not other posters.

At a guess, they toyed with that idea with NWN1. Maybe it's time to ressurect the modular structure of expansions for a base game in each franchise now that they got 3D environment that is decent and settle on a ruleset for each verse for a few years. I'd like that... 

Well, I find that Reyes changes a fair bit depending on PC's choices. And Liam starts doing things that are wiser. You can't "flip" every character you meet like in Kotor2, lol.

I didn't think you were "mocking" the game.  I thought your goal was to try to bring truth about the game to the forums, as a service to the Mass Effect franchise you love?  That would more entail constructive criticisms of the games than mocking, yes?